Jossy the Credibility Slayer

The crusading [Russian] newspaper Novaya Gazeta published a startling article April 1 that reported [Chechen leader, Ramzan] Kadyrov’s armed thugs were detaining and executing gay men, with more than 100 men already seized, three of them known to be dead and many others possibly murdered in extrajudicial “honour” killings.

A respected human rights expert, Ekaterina Sokiryanskaya, Russia project coordinator for the International Crisis Group, told the New York Times and the Guardian that she had been receiving similar reports.

According to the Novaya Gazeta report, the sweep began when a Moscow gay rights group began filing requests for demonstrations in Russia’s provincial cities. Although the group had not focused on the predominantly Muslim North Caucasus region, including Chechnya, the petitions galvanised a local drive to round up gay men.

“In Chechnya, the command was given for a ‘prophylactic sweep’ and it went as far as real murders,” Novaya Gazeta reported, saying the authorities searched for closeted gay men partly by posing as men seeking dates on social media websites.

The newspaper also noted that none of the men detained had been open about their homosexuality in a society where it is still strictly taboo.

All not true, says Kadyrov’s spokesman, because – wait for it – there are no gay men in Chechnya: “You cannot arrest or repress people who just don’t exist in the republic. If such people existed in Chechnya, law enforcement would not have to worry about them since their own relatives would have sent them to where they could never return.”

Fans of Islamic strongmen will recall Iran’s then-President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad telling Columbia University students, “we don’t have homosexuals like in your country… I do not know who has told you we have it.” In Iran, of course, homosexuality is illegal and sometimes even results in death penalty. By comparison, Chechnya makes Iran look like a bastion of the rule of law, which is quite an achievement, with the Chechen authorities seemingly vacillating between outsourcing “honour killings” to families and conducting extrajudicial killings themselves.

Call it Chrenkoff’s First Law, but whenever something outrageous happens around the world you can count on a left-wing celebrity to diminish and demean the tragedy by merely opening their mouth. Cue in “Buffy” and “Firefly” creator Joss Whedon:

In case this needs a translation for the non-woke, Joss means that this is the future of America under Trump.

Seriously?

A Muslim republic within Russia, whose Islam has been radicalised in part by two recent brutal wars with Russia, and which is now ruled with an iron fist by a Putin puppet, is murdering its own gay (or suspected gay) citizens, and Whedon’s first reaction is to think this is a teaching moment, as it shows us we need to stop Trump before he locks up homosexuals in concentration camps.

Seriously.

Just because you’re rich, famous and (in Joss’s case) talented, it does not mean you can’t be demented and delusional. Often, actually, they go hand in hand.